Frederick Crews, who has died aged 91, established himself as a literary critic within the Nineteen Sixties however went on within the following a long time to turn into one of many foremost opponents of Freudianism and debunkers of Freud himself. As urged by the title of his 2006 assortment, Follies of the Clever: Dissenting Essays, his work was a mixture of contrarian vitality seasoned with acerbic, if usually witty, sarcasm. He turned prodigious analysis and disputatious argument into the form of mental battle that ventured into leisure.
When his final ebook, Freud: The Making of an Phantasm, was printed in 2017, the critic Louis Menand mentioned Crews had “pushed a stake by its topic’s chilly, chilly coronary heart” together with his portrayal of Sigmund Freud as a drug-addicted, dishonest self-promoter. The Guardian then performed an e mail debate between Crews and the psychoanalyst Susie Orbach. Whereas accepting Orbach’s arguments for the advantages of Freud’s affect, Crews inspired her to “take away these Freudian blinders and suppose afresh”, making Orbach realise shortly that “we’re on totally different planets right here”. However Orbach was perceptive sufficient to notice how “the colonisation of literary criticism by elements of psychoanalysis should have been wearying for you”, as a result of that was the course Crews had adopted in his important profession.
Frederick was born in Philadelphia, to Ruby (nee Gaudet) and Maurice Crews, a patent lawyer. He attended Germantown Academy within the Philadelphia suburbs, the place he was class valedictorian and co-captain of the tennis staff. In Yale College’s directed research programme, he sampled a number of disciplines, earlier than graduating with a BA in English in 1955. One of many six tutorial prizes he received as an undergraduate was for his senior thesis on morals within the late novels of Henry James; in 1957 that turned his first ebook, The Tragedy of Manners.
He acquired his PhD in literature from Princeton in 1958; his dissertation there turned his second ebook, EM Forster: The Perils of Humanism (1962). He went straight from Princeton to show on the College of California, Berkeley, and in 1959 married the photographer Elizabeth Peterson. He stayed at Berkeley till his retirement in 1994.
In 1963 he printed The Pooh Perplex, a satirical assortment of important essays about AA Milne’s writings completed within the kinds of recent literary theories; it turned an surprising bestseller. One of many parodies was of Leslie Fiedler, whose landmark work, Love and Dying within the American Novel (1960), blended Freudian ideas and Jungian mythic archetypes into conventional shut studying. Freud was then nonetheless a part of Crews’ important repertoire, as his subsequent ebook, The Sins of the Fathers: Hawthorne’s Psychological Themes, drew closely on the foretelling of Freudian themes by Nathaniel Hawthorne, creator of The Scarlet Letter. But in Follies of the Clever, Crews would describe Fiedler as a “bag woman completely camped on the doorstep of criticism”.
At Berkeley, Crews was an anti-Vietnam battle activist and co-chaired the school peace committee. This led him to put in writing one other satire, The Patch Fee (1968), ostensibly the report of a presidential fee on “sure childraising practices”, which wound up doing in a gentler strategy to his fellow peace activist Dr Benjamin Spock (the paediatrician on whose childcare guides the 60s technology was raised) what he did to Freud. Displaying his opposite angle, he mentioned he left the anti-war motion “when even liberal Republicans joined”. On campus he was identified for his exercise: operating, mountaineering and driving round campus on a motorbike, which he continued to drive into his 80s.
In 1974 Crews wrote a writing type information for school college students, The Random Home Handbook, which stays in print. The next 12 months, in essays collected in Out of My System, he started to problem Freudian psychoanalysis. Though he accepted its usefulness in writing, he argued towards poststructural dogmas that insisted the author or critic couldn’t free themselves from ideology.
By the point his 1980 essay Evaluation Terminable was printed in Skeptical Engagements (1986), his portrayal of Freud’s methodology as unscientific and sometimes fraudulent had sparked “the Freud wars”. This continued for many years, a lot of it performed out in lengthy articles within the New York Overview of Books, most notably The Unknown Freud (1993), which generated equally expansive letters from Freud’s supporters, scary additional prolonged replies from Crews, like an mental’s gameshow.
The 90s added the “reminiscence wars”, which turned the title of his 1995 takedown of recovered reminiscence syndrome, which he denounced as overwhelmingly false. It led him to return to the defence, virtually on his personal, of the Penn State College soccer coach Jerry Sandusky, convicted in 2012 of molesting younger boys attending soccer clinics.
Crews remained an acute literary critic. His contrarian Critics Bear It Away (1992) excoriated more and more didactic strands of academe that eschewed literary complexity in favour of “mentioning an creator’s political evasions”. He condemned professors “educated in rational ideas however (who) contemplate rational ideas previous hat”. This led to 2001’s Postmodern Pooh, bringing his earlier satire updated.
In a 2005 NYRB assessment of Andrew Delbanco’s Melville: His World and His Work, he praised Delbanco’s assault on “prosecutorial” books whose inquests have been designed to not resolve whether or not the “crime of tradition” had been dedicated, however “to find out … Melville’s complicity in it”, whereas concurrently castigating Delbanco’s mentor Lionel Trilling for supporting “the portentous banalities of Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents”.
In 2017, because the storm raged round Making of an Phantasm, Crews responded to a letter within the NYRB from a critic who argued, as Orbach had, for the significance of Freud’s affect. Crews responded that the suggestion was “Freud is absolved of charlatanry by having tapped into the zeitgeist, however that’s exactly what probably the most adept charlatans do”.
Crews is survived by Elizabeth and their daughters, Gretchen and Ingrid.
